Play Ball

This week, baseball season opens again. Fifteen years ago, the opening of baseball season cracked a new chapter in my radio career: program director of a baseball team’s flagship station.

I was working in Clinton, Iowa, a nondescript town of about 30,000 on the Mississippi River. It was unusual in one way, however: Against the odds, it managed to support a class-A minor league baseball team. The team’s home games had been broadcast for years by the other station in town, which we will call Brand X. But the minor-league landscape had begun to change in the late 80s, and like other pro sports franchises, minor-league teams needed enhanced revenue streams to survive. Selling the rights to both home and road games would effectively double a team’s broadcasting revenue. And in 1993, my station put together a hefty offer for the Clinton team’s broadcast rights, both home and road games. Brand X knew we were going to do this, but instead of responding to our proposal with a competitive offer of their own, their general manager walked into the meeting and said, “Well, I suppose they’ve made you all kinds of big promises. Here’s our offer—we’ll keep doing the home games like we’ve always done, at the same rights fee we’ve always paid.” This wasn’t a rhetorical flourish—they actually believed that the team might prefer to keep doing what they had been doing instead of getting more money and more exposure. As you might expect, we got the rights—and we heard that Brand X was actually surprised. (They were run by an utterly clueless bunch of people, with an almost completely false conception of who their audience was and of how they were perceived in the community.) And so my station became the voice of the Clinton Lumber Kings, an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.

In a small market, you’re never going to know precisely how many people are listening to any broadcast. My guess is that there weren’t very many listening to us for baseball. Minor league baseball attracts most fans based on the entertainment experience at the park surrounding the games, rather than on the game of baseball itself. Only a small group of hardcores is going to live and die by the result of the games. Some listen out of simple enjoyment of the game’s rhythm on the radio—I still love the way baseball sounds on the radio, even though I’m not a fan anymore. But we didn’t seriously believe there were thousands hanging on every pitch from Appleton, Cedar Rapids, or even Clinton’s home park.

The reality of small-market radio, however, is that if you can sell advertising, a broadcast is considered successful, regardless of how many people are listening to it, so in that first year, we were successful. And in any event, we were sure that there was always at least one listener to every game. I am sure that with advancements in radio technology, you can automate baseball broadcasts now, but no such technology existed in 1993. And so our night guy became our baseball guy, getting the game on the air from wherever it was, and listening for his cues to play the commercials. This is tougher duty than you think. Sometimes an inning lasts three pitches, and sometimes it lasts half an hour. Ask anybody who’s ever board-opped a baseball game—we’ve all missed a cue because we were in the can. What’s worse is sitting out a rain delay, either at the start of the game or in the middle. You have to hang out until the game starts (or starts up again), even it’s far into the night, long after even the hardcores have given up on it, and it’s possible that no one but the board operator is listening.

As it turned out, 1993 was one of the most magical years in the history of the Clinton franchise: The team qualified for the league championship series but lost it. Six future major-leaguers were on the team’s roster during the season. One of them, pitcher Aaron Fultz, is still in the majors, and pitched for the Cleveland Indians last year. (Fultz was the Lumber Kings’ ace, but during the team’s pennant drive, he was traded away by the parent club to help them acquire a pitcher for their own pennant race. We were incensed.) The league’s best known player today is probably Johnny Damon of the Yankees, who played for Rockford.

I left the station shortly after the end of the 1993 season, and I don’t recall what happened with the broadcasts after that. I notice they’re back on Brand X for the 2008 season. I’ll bet they’re doing both home and road games, but you never know.